It feels like my entire world is caving in and I’m suffering from claustrophobia of the soul. I can’t breathe. I want to get out of here, but go where? Everywhere else I’ll still have myself. And I shouldn’t feel like this, because things are going really well.
I don’t feel good today. I just needed to say that. A real post will come soon.
Categories: Fear and other imaginary monsters
I might as well get this out of the way: my love and I split up a couple of weeks ago. It was right before I was to buy a ticket to go to his sister’s wedding, which thankfully I didn’t buy. Otherwise he would’ve owed me a couple hundred bucks if I couldn’t get a refund. I didn’t quite understand his reasons but it doesn’t matter. He is gone and his stuff has been returned to his place.
I’m trying to look at the positives of this: Now that I’m single again, I can hog the bed. I can sleep as late as I want! I can chew on ginger like it’s tobacco, put fruit in all my pancakes and flirt with people when I go to the bar because I’m single and I get to do whatever I want –
And I miss him terribly! I mean it. I miss him like crazy. For the first week I was having serious withdrawals. Who’s going to go on scenic bike rides with me? Who am I going to cook breakfast for? Who is going to make love to me, buy me flowers, and take me out to sushi? Of course I have all the answers to these questions. I’m getting a bike in a few weeks if I have to work it off, I invited a few friends over and woke up at the crack of dawn just to make them homemade crepes with fresh strawberries, bananas and whipped cream (and I even had a brunch vegan potluck which looks like it’ll turn into a monthly series) and my friends raved about the breakfast. And I can get a vibrator, order my own sushi and buy my own damned flowers. I don’t need anyone to do those things for me, but it helped to have someone around who wanted to spend time with me and give me an occasional compliment. Looking back on it there were a few things wrong with our relationship which might have made him question if we were a good match but I won’t discuss them here. He still wants to be friends, and I could open myself up to that possibility – it’s not everyday I meet someone with my exact same birth date. But not right now.
I thought about him when my friend Stephanie loaned me her copy of bell hooks’s All about Love. How I went through five years of college and never reading a single book of hers, I still don’t know. For those who haven’t read the book, the premise is that the word love is used in very messy terms. We use it for everything, as a noun, when it’s really a verb. She gives a working definition, which states that love is care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect and knowledge. I like that definition. That fits into the love that I hope I give others, and the love I want to receive.
One of the things I’m oddly ashamed of is that no one I’ve ever been with has ever said that they love me. In fact, what ends up happening, as things did with my love, is that they don’t feel “emotionally connected” to me, and they don’t think they’ll ever love me. Some have said that I seem “green” or “high maintenance” and I wonder if there’s some sort of short hand that I’m missing out on. I genuinely want to be nice to people, but it seems like they don’t pick up on that frequency, or they want premium channels of excitement and high drama and I’m just a basic NBC station. This analogy isn’t working.
Anyway, I had a strange experience reading the book. Seeing the word love typed in paragraphs multiple times felt invasive. I almost would’ve preferred to see the word “fuck” everywhere, but that was probably hooks’s point. As a culture we speak more about lack of love, as compared to finding an embracing love as a choice, as opposed to something we fall into. It also stated that a lot of people get in relationships where there’s extensive care, but no love. I believe this is also true of many of the relationships that I’ve witnessed, but I’m not the one in those situations so who’s to say that’s what they experience?
Often I wonder if I even know what I’m talking about, since hardly anyone says that they love me. My own mom won’t say it to me. A few months ago I went out with my old roommate for lunch and we started talking about relationships. She asked me the length of my longest relationships, so I told her three months (which is true), and her reply was “Are you a terrible girlfriend?” I didn’t respond. She then bragged about how she always has a man, that her longest relationship was her current one at four years, and she only did long term relationships. When she started to rattle off all these exes, I did the math in my head and calculated she hadn’t been single for longer than a week since she was 13. A mixture of awe, envy and confusion surged through me. She talked of her relationships as an accomplishment. These number and length of her relationships meant that she was mature, marriage ready, and a good girlfriend. But I also saw her serial monogamy as a sign that she couldn’t stand being alone. And her relationship with her then boyfriend wasn’t the greatest. It seemed like the only way they could communicate was in anger. It scared me. Their relationship was one of power struggles for control on both sides. It didn’t look very fun. Or loving for that matter.
Even after writing all of this I think I’ll be able to find the love that I want, and I’m trying, desperately not to write off what happened between my last ex and I as a failure or time wasted. I want to believe I can find someone who wants the same things as I do, but it’s hard. I still wonder if there’s something I’m doing wrong, or if I have a completely naïve Pollyanna vision about relationships and what I hope to bring. Is it about love, or is it about something else? Can someone else tell me what it’s all about?
Categories: Fear and other imaginary monsters · Philosopy and letters · love
